Dan E. Arvizu became the eighth Director of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on January 15, 2005.  NREL, located in Golden, Colorado, is the Department of Energy's primary laboratory for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and development.  NREL is operated for DOE by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC (Alliance).  Dr. Arvizu is President of Alliance and also is an Executive Vice President with the Midwest Research Institute, headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri.

Prior to joining NREL, Dr. Arvizu was the chief technology officer with CH2M HILL Companies, Ltd. Before joining CH2M he was an executive with Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He started his career and spent four years at the AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories.

In 2004, Dr. Arvizu was appointed by the President and confirmed by the full U.S. Senate to be on the 24-member National Science Board, which is the governing board of the National Science Foundation and the national science policy advisory body to the President and the Congress.  He chairs the Audit and Oversight Committee and is the co-chair of the Task Force on Sustainable Energy.

Dr. Arvizu serves on a number of Boards, Panels and Advisory Committees including the American Council on Renewable Energy Advisory Board; the Energy Research, Development, and Deployment Policy Project Advisory Committee at the Harvard Kennedy School; the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Alternative Energies; the Singapore Clean Energy International Advisory Panel; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III; the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Award Corporation; and the Colorado Renewable Energy Authority Board of Directors.

He has a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering from New Mexico State University and a Master of Science and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.